jQuery

If you've ever tried to use Spry data sets with a default implementation of Thickbox (a jQuery-based version of the familiar Lightbox), you've probably noticed that it doesn't work.

The reason for this, of course, is simple: out of the gates, thickbox.js fires off an initialization function (tb_init) through jQuery's ready(). What this means, technically, is that thickbox has already started its processing and element fishing before Spry's data sets have been fully loaded and rendered. What this means, practically, is that Thickbox won't work.

Though frustrating, there is a fairly simple way to work around this.

Conceptually, what we'll be doing is to bypass jQuery's ready() function and load tb_init manually AFTER we know Spry's data sets have fully loaded and rendered.

First, we need to figure out when the data sets are done processing. This is pretty simple, because Spry comes with a handy way of sniffing this out.

We'll start by setting up a new data region observer. Our observer will watch the data set and when it reaches the "state" that we define, we can manually fire the thickbox.js processing.